Techical Director, FDE

About CoLab

At CoLab, we want to help mechanical engineering teams bring life-changing products to market years sooner.

CoLab is a cloud based platform for engineering design review. We make it easy for subject matter experts (SMEs) across your business to access, evaluate, and comment on 2D drawings and 3D models. Our built-in AI peer checker, AutoReview, scans designs for common errors or non-compliance with your standards and guidelines. AutoReview creates markups and comments on your files, in context – just like a human checker.

With CoLab, human SMEs and AI work together to help you make better decisions and improve designs faster. We automatically capture knowledge from across your global business that would otherwise be buried in emails, spreadsheets, slide decks, and unknown locations in Sharepoint or PLM. Then, we make sure every lesson learned and every design guideline is applied exactly when it matters.

Companies like Johnson Controls, Komatsu, Schaeffler, and Polaris have launched products 40% faster, cut BOM costs by 50%, and reduced quality escapes by 15% in 1 year.

About the Role

As Technical Director - FDE, you will lead and scale CoLab’s Forward Deployed Engineering team. You’ll be responsible for executing on the vision, hiring and developing a high-performing team, and personally leading the delivery of our most strategic, technically complex customer initiatives.

You’ll act as a technical leader and executive sponsor for key enterprise integrations and deployments, owning everything from architecture and strategy through to development, deployment and sustained customer value. You’ll work cross-functionally with customer success, product, engineering, and sales, while establishing repeatable processes and building a long-term foundation for this function.

This role is for someone who thrives on ambiguity, leads with clarity, and gets energy from turning ambiguous customer problems into successful, scalable solutions. You’ve done this before and you’re ready to do it again, even better.

Our Ideal Candidate

You’ve built and led an FDE or Solutions Engineering team within a SaaS company - ideally involving deep integrations into enterprise systems. You know how to navigate complex customer environments, architect for scale and reliability, and lead both with technical depth and customer empathy.

You’re a builder at heart. You’re not afraid to roll up your sleeves and get involved in the work alongside the team when required. You can speak with confidence to external stakeholders, and you do it with clarity, humility, and high trust.

What You’ll Own

• Lead the Forward Deployed Engineering function at CoLab, including team structure, hiring, onboarding, and performance management

• Serve as executive technical sponsor for strategic customers, guiding architecture, integration strategy, and technical deployment

• Personally lead delivery of complex, high-impact projects that interface with various enterprise systems such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Identity Management and Access Controls systems, and Data & Analytics platforms, etc

• Collaborate cross-functionally to prioritize technical customer initiatives and remove delivery blockers

• Develop repeatable processes, tools, and internal infrastructure to scale the FDE function

• Provide structured feedback loops to Product and Engineering that directly shape the roadmap

• Build long-term relationships with enterprise customers and deepen CoLab’s technical credibility

Qualifications

• 5–10+ years of experience in technical roles, including at least 2–3 years leading FDE, Solutions Engineering, or similar teams in a SaaS context

• Proven experience building a new function or team from scratch

• Strong coding skills and technical fluency - comfortable leading implementation when needed

• Deep experience working with enterprise systems (e.g., PLM, ERP, IdP, data lakes)

• Excellent communication skills and stakeholder management (internal and external)

• Experience embedding with customer teams and navigating complex technical orgs

• Bonus: Familiarity with engineering/manufacturing data and AI-powered tooling

Extra Details

• This is a full-time, permanent role with a competitive compensation package (salary + stock options)

• Includes extended health benefits, unlimited vacation, and RRSP/401k matching

• Work remotely from anywhere in Canada or the US (EST hours preferred)

Equity Note

Frequently cited statistics show that people who identify with historically marginalized groups are likely to apply to jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. We encourage you to help us break that statistic and apply even if you don’t meet every single qualification—your potential is what matters most to us.